Fantasia Dispatch 1 -- Tekkon Kinkreet

[This is my first time attending Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival and I was struck by the excitement and enthusiasm vibrating Concordia's Théâtre Hall just prior to the opening film. The 11th Edition of the festival boasts a massive line-up of about 130 films from around the world spread across 19 days from Andrei Tarkovsky to Uwe Boll. It promises to be an eclectic and intense ride to the brink of cinematic mayhem.]

The Fantasia Opening Film was Studio 4C's Tekkon Kinkreet. An unusual collaboration consisting of an American director and screenwriter with a cutting edge Japanese animation house using Taiyō Matsumoto's much loved manga (Black and White) all set to British techno-score.

The film follows the exploits of two young orphans, or 'stray cats,' unsubtly named Black and White (more on that in a moment) as they defend their decaying theme-park-esque neighborhood, Treasure Town, from all manner of interlocutors. These include other youth gangs as well as Yakuza and urban developers. Black is the confident leader, whose passion for sheltering White from the evils of the world is balanced with his own tendency towards violence coupled with delusions of grandeur. White is (seemingly) more innocent. Prone to nurturing an apple seed in the squalor of the alley they live in all the while sporting a wide assortment of gaudy head-gear and punctuating occasionally knowing sentences with a giggle: White is clearly the wise fool. Black and White as characters are not the model of subtlety (shocking!) and the supporting characters fall into caricature and short-hand as often as not (there are a couple exceptions), but surprisingly this plays strongly in favour of placing the focus of the film on the city itself as a character. The realization that in a large urban sprawl change is inevitable and relationships of people to their environment are elastic and fleeting (and should be celebrated for their tenuousness) is what the film has on its mind at the forefront.

The story elements in Tekkon Kinkreet do collide together in a mishmash indicative of the attempt to distill the serialized manga into a feature film, but the texture of the unending urban sprawl (rendered through some of the most breathtaking background artwork this side of Rintaro's Metropolis or Áron Gauder's Nyócker!) is what lingers. The mixture of tenderness and violence may be unsettling (a very distant echo of Anders Morgenthaler's Princess), but there is a nearly blinding optimism at the core of Tekkon Kinkreet which is infectious in spite of itself. It is very difficult not to love this film (despite the obviousness of it all at times) in the same way that White intones "talking bad about people makes your heart dry up." There is a lot of heart mashed in with more than a little violence towards children. Take that as you will.

To say the film is a technical marvel is an understatement. On one hand, the film feels to be lovingly hand-made, particularly the characters sparse, line-drawn faces. While on the other hand, the camera work is some of the most sophisticated work done in (mainly) 2D animation. The hand-held, often zooming camera aesthetic has arrived to anime and it achieves a similar ground level chaos-intimacy as Paul Greengrass's work and there is a long-take buried in the film worthy of Children of Men.

Paradoxically, Tekkon Kinkreet is both a melancholic and relentless fantasy which careens at breakneck speed through a sprawling metropolis on the verge of significant change. It is puberty viewed through the eyes of an old man.

[Director Michael Arias was on hand for a Q&A after the film citing chief references for the visual strategy of the film as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund's City of God. The climax of the film, Arias cited painter Francis Bacon as a key influence. He went into further detail regarding getting UK techno-stylists Plaid to do the score because that was what he was listening to at the time while developing and testing animation software using images from the Black and White manga. Plaid wrote an original score for film after Arias contacted them via their website.]

Tekkon Kinkreet also will be getting limited release in the US on July 13.

Trailer (Embedded Flash)